Where true freedom lies is in the way that you look at it. And if you look at it in a certain way, then there’s a way to achieve this kind of inner peace, you know, what the Bible describes and what A Course In Miracles describes as:
“The peace of God which passeth understanding.”
And that kind of peace is not dependent on certain circumstances. It’s not dependent on what appears to happen in the world. In fact, you can have this kind of peace regardless of what appears to be happening in the world. And that’s real peace. Because it’s something that can’t be shaken by anything in this world.
And that’s really what a guy like Jesus was talking about 2000 years ago when He talked about building your house upon the rock instead of on the sand. The sand is the shifting sands of time, the sands of this world, what the Buddhists would call, “impermanence,” something that literally cannot be depended on. The only thing that we can depend on in this world is that it’s gonna change. You know, that one minute from now, it’s not gonna be the same as it is now. You can’t depend on that.
And the rock is what we really are, which is spirit.
But this kind of spirit, once again, isn’t the old-fashioned idea of spirit, because that old-fashioned idea of spirit is still a separation idea.
People imagine that when they lay their body aside they go on as something. And this something that they go on as looks suspiciously like the body that they just left. So it’s almost no different than the idea of having a body. You know, it’s just a different kind of body. And that’s not what real spirit is.
Real spirit is actually perfect oneness. It’s something that is indivisible; it’s something that is whole and one and complete. In fact, the word “holy” comes from the word “whole”, and with that being the case, this kind of spirit would be immortal. It’s invulnerable. It’s something that can’t be touched by anything in this world. It’s something that can’t be threatened.
In fact, in that famous introduction in A Course In Miracles, Jesus says,
“Nothing real can be threatened.”
Well, what that is, is spirit. But this kind of spirit is something that is literally invulnerable. And when you get in touch with that, you realize that you can’t be hurt because you’re not a body.
And so, when that introduction says, “Nothing unreal exists,” that would include the body or anything that is not perfect oneness; which certainly narrows it down.
And then it says, “Herein lies the peace of God.” And so, we’re actually gonna talk about a way of attaining this peace and getting in touch with what we really are, instead of what we thought we were.
So in the 1980’s I was having a lot of really good experiences. And I was having a really good time for a few years and I started making money, and people knew who I was and it felt good and my family didn’t think I was a jerk anymore. And things were going, you know, pretty cool. But after a few years, I’d say by 1987 or so, I was really shocked to find out that, that wasn’t making me happy either.
So now I had another problem. Because not doing anything, that didn’t make me happy and now doing everything, it turned out, that didn’t make me happy either. So I figured, you know, what on Earth am I going to do? If neither one makes me happy…
And then I made another decision.
I decided that I was gonna change my life again. And I felt that I was supposed to do something else, not that there was anything wrong with being a musician. In fact, it’s really interesting, the number of guitar players who I met since I turned my life completely to spirituality. And I found that being a musician is a very good place to be coming from if you wanted to become involved with spirituality. The two seemed to go hand in hand because there’s that artistic aspect to it.
And I decided in 1987 I was gonna change my life again and I was gonna do something different. And that somehow I felt it would be connected to this relationship that I still felt with Jesus. But I couldn’t put my finger on it once again. I didn’t know what form that relationship was going to take but I felt that somehow there was a connection and that I needed to get someplace that was quiet. You know, I needed to get someplace where I could think. And by then I had the band booked two years in advance, so it took me a couple years to get out of the band that I was in. But by the beginning of 1990 I was moving to Maine.
And Maine isn’t that far from Massachusetts. It’s only a hundred miles between where I live now and where I lived before, but it’s a completely different world. Maine is very quiet, very peaceful, has clean air, clean water. There are no big cities in Maine at all. It has the lowest crime rate in America, very peaceful. If you wanna get to a place to think and have peace and quiet, well that’s the place to go.
And I got up to Maine and I had kinda like this vague idea that I would start a business and support myself. And I get up there to Maine and there are like, no people. In town there’s like no sidewalks. Maybe I shoulda done more research but the business thing didn’t go too well. But what did go really well was that I felt that I started to get really good at meditating. Now I had experimented with meditation in the 1980’s and I remember part of my spiritual life was like..I didn’t read too much, I’m sorry to say, but I did read a book in the 1980’s by Shirley MacLaine called Out on a Limb.
And when I read some of the things in there, like stuff like Buddhism and Daoism and Hinduism and all these ism’s, I realized that I already knew this stuff. And the reason that I knew it (she was also writing about reincarnation) and I realized that the reason I already knew these things is because I’d already studied them in previous lifetimes, and they were just coming back to me when I was reminded of them. They would come back into my awareness, and one of the things that was connected with that, was that I’d experimented with meditation.
And I felt like I was getting pretty good at it. I didn’t study it very much, I just kinda made up what I thought was my own kind of meditation. And then, when I finally got up to Maine in the early 1990’s, I had plenty of time on my hands.
And so I felt like I could practice my meditation and eventually I started to get really good at it. And when I did, I felt like I was getting to the point where I could achieve absolute stillness. It was like, when I got to that point, there were no thoughts interfering at all. It was like I could shut them off and when I did, I was achieving absolute stillness. And when that happened, I felt like I was getting in touch with something deep, that deeper aspect of the mind that I was talking about.
Because the conscious mind is really just a trick. That tip of the iceberg. It’s kind of like the way Albert Einstein described it. Einstein said that,
“A person’s experience is kind of like an optical delusion of consciousness.”
And that’s what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is a delusion. It’s a trick and we think that it’s real.
Just like when we go to the movies. We think that what’s upon the screen is real and we don’t realize that it’s coming from a place that is hidden. And in this life it’s actually our own unconscious mind that is projecting the images that we are seeing. And then we accept them as reality and we don’t realize that reality is not at all what we think it is.
And so, when I started to get in touch with this deeper aspect of the mind, in Maine, I felt like the magnitude of it was very impressive. I felt like I was getting in touch with something big. I didn’t really understand it but it was exciting to me and I felt like it was important and everything else in my life was going to hell.
My personal life was in a shambles. I wasn’t making any money. My wife was threatening to leave me but the meditation thing was going really good. So I kept doing that and I remember when I was up there in Maine, for almost three years now, (this was 1992) things were so bad for me financially that I decided that maybe I should go back to playing my guitar to make some money, because I was good at making money with my guitar.
And I took my guitar out of the closet. (I had this Les Paul custom guitar which I still have to this day). And I took it out of the closet and I started to practice, because I decided I had to make some money here. I had to get out there and start playing my guitar.
And I’m practicing, and both of my hands are occupied while I’m playing the guitar, and then all of a sudden, I’m standing there playing the guitar, and I feel this other hand. But this hand, which I couldn’t see, was pushing down on the end of the guitar. And it was pushing the guitar down to the ground and me along with it. And I felt myself being pushed down by this hand that I couldn’t see and it was an astonishing experience.
And I got the message. And the message was very clear to me. It was: “No.
That’s not what you’re supposed to do anymore.”
You know, you’ve already done that. Kinda like, been there done that, and you’re supposed to do something else. There’s something else waiting for you and my experience was, yeah…it will be revealed to me.
I didn’t know what it is, I can’t put my finger on the form it’s gonna take, but I could tell that the message is: “No, you’re not supposed to play your guitar anymore. There’s something else for me.”
And it was two months later. I remember the date. It was December the 21st 1992 and I was sitting there in that same living room in Maine and I was in one of my meditations. And I came out of my meditation and I looked over at my living room couch. And there were two people sitting there on my living room couch. There was like this beautiful, wonderful, exquisite looking woman who was sitting there…and some guy. And the woman started to speak to me. And I started to speak back to her.
People have asked me, “Why didn’t you go running out of the room screaming when this happened?”
And there are a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they looked extraordinarily peaceful. In fact, if you could see the look on their faces and get their attitude, which is what spiritual sight really is, that’s where it shows up, in your attitude. And if you could hear the tone of their voices, there was nothing about them that would inspire anything except for peace. They had this wonderful, peaceful way about them. So fear didn’t really seem like an appropriate response to them.
Looking back on it with hindsight (we all know that hindsight has 20-20 vision) and looking back on it with hindsight, I would say that another reason why I wasn’t afraid of them was because in my unconscious mind I must have already known who they were. Because it was explained to me later that I had this relationship with them and that we had known each other at times before. But I didn’t realize it at the time. I just realized that there was this incredible phenomenon where all of a sudden these two people were there on my living room couch. And I knew that they must have appeared from out of nowhere because the doors were locked.
I didn’t see them appear the first time, but I did see them disappear the first time. And when they disappeared it was like instantaneous. It was like, say you’re watching TV and you had a remote control and you pointed the remote control at the TV. You flicked the remote, the picture changes instantaneously. That’s what it was like when they disappeared that first time. And also, I saw them appear every time after that and they would appear instantaneously. It was almost like they were changing frequencies or vibrations or something. They would appear instantly out of nowhere and they would get right down to business and they would start talking.
And I got used to it eventually but this first time it was really kind of weird, you know, because I felt like they must have materialized from out of nowhere. And here’s this beautiful woman talking to me and I’m just kinda like automatically starting talking back to her. And then they would seem normal for a while (and that was strange too, how normal it would seem, you know, they appeared as bodies).
And they were just as real as any other bodies that I’ve ever seen. And I think the reason they appeared to me as humans was because they wanted the conversations that we would have, to be human. You see, a lot of the spiritual messages that we get, a lot of the teachings that we get are channeled. They seem to come from up above somewhere. They seem a little bit removed from our every day life. But these two guys, it was like they were right there in my face. You know, and they spoke in my language and they put things in a way to me that I couldn’t get away from.
They were so clear and they were so direct there was just no escaping the message that they were trying to give me. And I think that they knew that if I could understand them and if I could eventually apply what they were saying in my every day life, then probably other people could too.
They probably figured that if I could do, (you know, it’s kinda like the guinea pig) then anybody could do it. And so they would give me all this information and that first time it felt kind of strange. And I was a little nervous and when I became nervous I became kind of like a smart ass. You know, that’s my defense. That’s how I protect myself. I become kinda like a wise guy and I would give them these, you know, kinda like smart-ass comments and they would give it right back to me. They would take everything that I did and everything in the world and turn it around and use it as some kind of teaching tool. And in this case it was to eventually teach me that I really didn’t need to be that way and I really didn’t need that kind of defense. But it took me a while to catch on to that.
So that first time she would talk to me and I would talk back with her and it would seem normal for a while. Then after about five minutes I’d think,
“Jesus Christ. These people just materialized out of thin air!”
And then it would seem weird. But then I’d go back and I’d start talking to them again and they’d go on and on. And they’d talk nice and normal, and then after a few more minutes I’d think,
“Jesus Christ. These people just materialized out of thin air!”
And, you know, it would go back and forth like that, and that’s the way it was the first time. And eventually I got used to them and I started to feel like they were my friends. And they had a lot to say.
And not the least of which was that the woman there, Pursah, 2,000 years ago she was Thomas, now known as Saint Thomas and also known as the author of the famous Gospel of Thomas.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, The Gospel of Thomas is the first Gospel that was ever written about Jesus. And the church managed to destroy it. In fact, The Gospel of Thomas disappeared from the face of the Earth for like sixteen hundred years, and it wasn’t seen by anybody for that whole time.
And interestingly enough, and fortunately, somebody had the presence of mind to bury a copy of The Gospel of Thomas in Egypt, in a place called Nag Hammadi around 325 A.D.
And it’s not an original copy and it’s not in the original language and it also contains some sayings that were added on later. So it’s not a totally authentic copy but it is the only copy that we have and it was dug up in 1945 in Egypt and it took a while to be translated.
And when the church heard about it, they said,
“Oh. You can’t pay any attention to that. It’s spurious and it’s a forgery and you can’t pay any attention to that kind of stuff. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Jesus. It’s all made up.”
And they got away with that for a while. But fortunately after it was translated, biblical scholars started to study The Gospel of Thomas. And they came to a somewhat different conclusion than the church. What the Biblical scholars found out was that a lot of The Gospel of Thomas, you know, my teacher Pursah said, that about two-thirds of The Gospel of Thomas are authentic and about one-third were added onto them later.
And the biblical scholars started to look at those authentic sayings and they would say:
“Wait a minute. You know, this looks like the things that Jesus may have actually said back in that place and time. They’re phrased in a much more realistic manner. The way that they’re said, it seems more like that culture and that time. This could be original. This could be the way that Jesus really was back then.”
And so, the biblical scholars were coming to a different way of looking at The Gospel of Thomas than the church. And according to Pursah, who was Saint Thomas 2,000 years ago, not only was it the first Gospel that was ever written, but she even went out of her way to quote about 20 of them, 20 of those sayings that are in The Gospel and explained them to me.
Now, she said that these first Gospels had no stories in them. That what we’ve come to think of as the mainstream Gospels, with all these stories in them, those were made up later. And the first Gospels had no stories in them. They were simply a listing of things that Jesus actually said.
So the first ones were just recorded sayings of Jesus. And then, oh maybe twenty years after that, you had the apostle Paul come along and it was really his theology that is the basis of Christianity. What the apostle Paul did, you know, he felt very guilty because he persecuted Christians and he killed a lot of them and he felt very bad about that.
And he had this experience on the road to Damascus, which was part genuine and part out of the ego. And after that he turned to Jesus and he made up this theology which was very much in keeping with his Jewish heritage and the old idea that you can take an innocent and sacrifice him and somehow that atones for the sins of others. That’s an idea that goes back a good 700 years before Jesus. And you can find it in the Book of Isaiah, and it had nothing to do with Jesus. It’s something the Paul took and kinda like super-imposed onto Jesus and now made Him the ultimate sacrifice and made Him atone “for everybody’s sins.” And it’s that theology that became the basis of Christianity, not the teachings of Jesus, which you can still see some of in The Gospel of Thomas and some of which did survive in the bible also.
And so, according to Pursha, people took what they believed and super-imposed it onto Jesus. And that’s what always happens with great spiritual teachers. You know, Jesus was not a Christian. And for that matter, Buddha was not a Buddhist. You know, he was a Hindu. And then people come along later and they make up religions and it’s kinda like they’re adding their own beliefs to it, and making it more about them than about the original. And that’s certainly what organized religion did with Jesus and what they came up with didn’t have too much to do with what Jesus was really talking about.
And one of the reasons that my teachers Arten and Pursah, as they called themselves, but they were really Saint Thomas 2,000 years ago, and Arten there, he was Saint Thaddeus 2,000 years ago, one of the original disciples of Jesus, like Thomas, except Thaddeus wasn’t very famous. He wasn’t very well known, and that was fine with him. He was just kinda like the quiet learner, which is cool.
And one of the reasons they appeared to me was that they said they wanted to set the record straight. Not only about their relationship with Jesus, but you know, what he was really about, what He was teaching. And to that end they gave me a vision of this guy whose name was Jeshua; His name wasn’t Jesus. In fact my teachers refused to call Him Jesus. His name was Jeshua and if that had been translated well, then it would’ve been Jeshua with a “J.” So Jeshua would have been the right translation. Jesus was a bad translation, but everybody knows Him like that.
So my teachers decided that they would just call Him “J” and that that way, they could cover both. So they just referred to Him as “J.” And according to them, the “J” that they knew 2,000 years ago, was a Jewish Rabbi and because of that, He understood Jewish mysticism. He understood the kinds of things that we would see today, in the Kabbalah for example. One of the most basic ideas of Jewish mysticism would be the idea that Heaven is closeness to God and that hell is distance from God. But Jesus, being an uncompromising kind of a guy, didn’t stop there. For Him, Heaven would be perfect oneness with God. And hell wouldn’t just be distance from God, hell would be anything that is separate from God.
And what that does is that it narrows it down to just two things. You see, we think that we have billions of things to choose between. But it turns out that there are really only two things to choose between. And in Jesus’ way of thinking, and in His way of thinking you either have perfect oneness with God, which is Heaven, or you have anything else. Anything that is separate from God would be hell.
It’s interesting that people are always worried about the idea of going to hell, because they don’t realize that they’re already there. Anything that is not perfect oneness with God would be hell, as far as the way Jeshua thought about it, and so that’s a very basic idea of Jewish mysticism.
You see, Jesus was to spirituality kinda like what Mozart was to music. When Mozart was born he already had everything that he needed and knew pretty much everything he needed to know. By the time he was three years old, he could play the piano. By the time he was six years old he could write symphonies and that was kind of what Jesus was to spirituality. By the time He was twelve years old He was the One who was teaching in the temples. He was the One who was teaching other rabbis everything. You know, He already knew everything.
Plus He was from the middle east. Most people now, you know, with western religion, they seem to think that Jesus was from Mississippi or something…and no…He was from the middle east and because of that His approach was much more mindful and eastern, and much more in line with that kind of a culture. And because of that He certainly would have understood the teachings of Buddhism.
And one of the basic teachings of Buddhism is that there is only one ego appearing as many. So what that means is, that there’s only one of us that thinks that it’s here. And you’re it. There isn’t anybody else. Not really. So there’s only one of us that thinks that it’s here and that’s the Buddhist’s concept of ego.
It’s kind of like an all-encompassing idea that includes everybody and everything. It shouldn’t be confused with Freud’s concept of ego, but I think it’s interesting that Freud didn’t use the word “ego”. He used the word “ish”, the German word, which means “I.” So to Freud’s way of thinking, the ego was the concept of an individual identity.
And that’s interesting because that’s also a part of the Buddhist’s idea of ego. So what the ego is, is it’s one ego appearing as many. So it’s one all-encompassing being that thinks that it’s here and thinks that it has some kind of an individual identity that is separate from God.
And Jesus understood that. And if that’s true, if there’s really only one ego appearing as many, then Jesus, being a pretty smart guy, realized something that probably nobody has ever realized in history. See, I remember…you know, I would go through life thinking it was very important what other people think about me. And a lot of us think that. You know, it’s very important what other people think. And I used to think that if I could be successful and if I could make a name for myself and make a lot of money, then the world would look at me in a certain way and they would look up to me. And if I was successful and got the world to look up to me, then that would make me happy.
I thought maybe that would make me happy. And of course, that doesn’t work and we all know it doesn’t work, you know, if being rich and famous and successful made you happy, then Elvis would’ve been like the happiest guy who ever lived.
And it doesn’t work, and the reason it doesn’t work is because of something Jesus understood. He understood that if there’s only one ego appearing as many, then first of all, the unconscious mind must know that. We may not realize that with the conscious mind, :because all we’re doing is looking out and seeing Einstein’s optical delusion. All we’re seeing is separation out there. But the unconscious mind knows the truth. The unconscious mind, that part which is hidden from us, knows that there’s really one of us. It knows that there’s really only one ego appearing as many, because you can bury the truth. Yeah, you can keep it out of your awareness, but you can’t ever lose it.
It’s still there. It’s still there for the remembering.
So if the unconscious mind knows that there’s really only one of us here, then what are we doing if we go through life judging and condemning other people? All we’re really doing is sending a message directly into our own unconscious mind that we are being worthy of being judged and condemned. That we are guilty. That we are not worthy of being with God.
Whatever you’re put out there is actually going right into your own unconscious mind. You may think that you’re getting rid of it but you’re not. Because there’s not really anybody else out there. So the only one that you’re really judging and condemning is yourself.
So Jesus understanding that said:
“Wait a minute. If that’s true, then what I’m gonna do, knowing everything that I know, I’m gonna go through life and I’m gonna see everybody, without exception, as being totally innocent. I’m gonna see everybody as being Christ. I’m gonna see everybody as being totally worthy of being with God. I’ll see them as being spirit, which is one with God.”
Because, once again, Jesus being a Jewish mystic understood the Oneness of God and He used the old prayer of the God of Israel, “The Lord our God is One,” and He understood the whole concept of perfect oneness, and if it’s perfect, then nobody can be left out.
Nobody can be excluded or else it isn’t whole, and it’s not complete. And He understood that if you partially forgive the world, which is what most people do, then you will only be partially forgiven. But if you completely forgive the world, as Jesus did, then you will be completely forgiven. Because it’s always you who is being forgiven or judged by yourself. It just doesn’t look that way.
And so, Jesus understood something that even to this very day, people still don’t get. Even the Quantum physicists with all of their advanced knowledge of science, even the new psychology with all of its knowledge. Most people still don’t understand something that Jesus clearly understood.
And what He understood was, taking myself for example, the way that I would feel about myself and the way that I will experience myself is not determined by what you think about me. It’s not determined by how you look at me. The way that I will really feel about myself and the way that I will really experience myself is actually determined by how I look at you. And that’s exactly opposite of the way that the world thinks.
But it’s absolutely essential to understand that if you wanna make real progress with spirituality. Because now, by understanding that it’s the way that you look at them, you are shifting to a condition of being at cause instead of at effect. Now you’re in charge. Now you’re realizing that, “Hey. This is all coming from me and I’m the one who made the whole thing up.”
And we’ll see as we get into the teaching of A Course In Miracles why that’s the case, and why we made it up.
But it’s very important to remember that it’s how you look at other people that will determine your own experience of yourself and ultimately, what you believe yourself to be. And you have to shift to being at cause. It’s like when Buddha said, “I am awake,” that’s what he meant. You know, he meant that he was totally at cause and realized that he was not one of these bodies in the dream. He was not one of these dream figures out there walking around, that he was the maker of the entire dream. And that it wasn’t being done to him, it was being done by him.
And it was from that condition of cause that he was able to undo the ego, that false identity that thinks that it is separate from its source, and return to the source. And Jesus was able to do the same thing. And I think that if there’s a difference between Buddha and Jesus, and I don’t think that there’s much, because what we have is not all the words of Buddha and we don’t have all the words of Jesus and they both came to the same place at the end.
I think that one of the things that is a great contribution of the Jesus in A Course In Miracles is this wonderful, lofty vision of God that we’re presented with. Because the God of A Course In Miracles really is perfect love. You know, a lot of religions have said that God is perfect love but A Course in Miracles gives us a God who really is perfect love, Who is flawless, Who is perfect, Who could not create anything that was not perfect or else He Himself wouldn’t be perfect.
And so, this is a God that is totally above anything bad, anything divided or anything separate. And so Jesus said things in The Gospel of Thomas, He would say like, “I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was given the things of My Father. Therefore I say, if one is whole, one would be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.”
And I think the moral of that is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a little bit whole. Your allegiance has to be undivided. You have to choose, in the way that you look at things, the way that Jesus did, either for perfect oneness or for delusion and separation.
And what you choose will determine your own experience of yourself, your own spiritual progress and eventually the undoing of the ego and awakening in God, where we’ve really been all along, but we just didn’t understand that. And it’s in doing that, it’s in returning to a state of wholeness that it becomes possible to end reincarnation.
And what my teachers told me about eventually was how to practice a certain kind of forgiveness, which is not the way the world usually thinks of forgiveness, in such a way that it actually leads to the end of reincarnation, leads you to the point where you don’t have to come here any more as a body. And I know that a lot of people are interested in not coming back again, but I think that they have to realize that there’s this thing in the mind that prevents us from ending reincarnation.
And as long as it’s there in the unconscious mind, this unconscious guilt, that we don’t even know about, that’s there in the mind, as long as it’s there, and until it’s completely healed and removed by the Holy Spirit then we will always keep coming back here. So if we really wanna end reincarnation and not come back here any more, then we have to have healed this unconscious guilt that is in the mind. And the way for the Holy Spirit to heal it for us, is for us to do our part, and practice the kind of forgiveness that my teachers taught me, eventually, in the Disappearance of the Universe.
Some people are of the mistaken impression that when the body dies, then they leave the Earth. But no, all that happens is that they come back again until this unconscious guilt is healed. And that’s why A Course In Miracles says, “The world is not left by death but by truth.”
So it’s actually in learning the truth and applying it while we still appear to be in the body that we can eventually undo the ego completely, become whole again and awaken from the dream and achieve enlightenment. And my teachers told me exactly how to do that.
There’s this line from A Course In Miracles that says, “Into eternity where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh.”
And I think part of the problem that holds everything in place, is that we take it so damned seriously. You know, we’re afraid to laugh at things, and that seems to be true when it comes to spirituality too. People take their spirituality so seriously and they really don’t have to.
Jesus, 2,000 years ago, He had a good sense of humor. My teachers said that he liked to bring out the joy in people and that He liked to laugh. And I’m glad that now a days you see a lot of drawings of Jesus, smiling and laughing. Most of the movies will give us this suffering, brooding kind of a Jesus, but you notice creeping in there, this whole different image of Jesus, of laughing and smiling and having a good time. And that’s really what he was like. So, I’ll tell you a joke that involves spirituality and Buddhism. In fact I heard this joke in New York City. This is definitely a New York joke.
This Buddhist is walking in Central Park, and he’s walking along in Central Park minding his own business, and the Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and he says to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.”
(Well, that’s just the first part of the joke.)
Now what happens after that, is that the Buddhist gets his hot dog from the hot dog vendor and then the Buddhist asks for his change. But the hot dog vendor says, “Ah! Change come from within.”
So that’s definitely a New York City joke.
I think that humor is important. My teachers used it a lot. I like to use it a lot in my talks and we don’t have to take everything so seriously.
What happened eventually with my teachers in The Disappearance of the Universe was they gave me a lot of material, but eventually they worked into the teachings of A Course In Miracles. And there was a very important reason for that. According to them the voice that you find in The Gospel of Thomas, which they talked about a lot, because that was their experience 2,000 years ago, Thomas and Thaddeus actually went off and started a sect based on Jesus and His teachings in The Gospel of Thomas and they visited many countries.
In fact, Thomas is still famous this very day in Syria and parts of Europe, and he went to India. The church tried to write Thomas out of history and they couldn’t because he was too famous. So what they did instead, in the New Testament, was they just tried to make him look bad. You know, they tried to make him look like the “doubting Thomas” like he didn’t have faith or stuff like that, but it’s just kind of silly. Jesus and Thomas were very close and Thomas was the first and most well known teacher of Jesus and then history changed things as it went along.
But Arten and Pursah came to set the record straight. And they pointed out that the Jesus of The Gospel of Thomas was teaching that Heaven, which is our true home, is actually here right now. It’s simply out of our awareness. It’s something that we don’t see.
In fact Jesus says in The Gospel of Thomas, the disciples come up to Him, and they say, “When will the Kingdom come?”
And Jesus says, “It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Behold here,’ or ‘Behold there.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.”
So, in other words, it’s here. It’s here right now but it’s out of our awareness. It’s something that we’re not in touch with. It’s actually our true reality.
And that is very much in harmony with what Jesus says in that, once again, famous introduction to A Course In Miracles. It says, “This course does not aim to teach the meaning of love for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is our natural inheritance.”
Well, our natural inheritance is nothing less than the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s all ours and it’s what we deserve and it’s where we belong. But it’s out of our awareness and what we need to do now is to remove these blocks, these barriers we put in between ourselves and our awareness of our perfect oneness. In fact that is A Course In Miracle’s definition of Heaven. It is the awareness of perfect oneness and the knowledge that there is nothing else, nothing else outside of this oneness, nothing else within.
And it’s that, that we’re going to get back in touch with by undoing the ego. And the best way to undo the ego and return to our awareness of what we really are is through the great learning aid of the Holy Spirit, which is forgiveness. But once again, it’s not the old-fashioned kind of forgiveness. This is a whole new ballgame. It’s a whole new paradigm.
So eventually my teachers started to talk about A Course In Miracles and gave me a very quick overview of the Course’s metaphysics. And I kinda like, want to share some of that with you right now. Not because theology’s important or metaphysics are important, but I think it’s helpful to understand these kinds of things because it makes us understand what’s being done for us every time we practice the kind of forgiveness that we’re going to get into in just a little while.
Because the more we realize how great it is for us to do it, the more likely we are to do it. The more we realize how all these ideas fit together the more possible it will be for us to remember the truth when the going gets tough. Because after you go out there in your every day life, certain things are gonna happen and the stuff is gonna hit the fan and you’re gonna forget about all this. And you’re not gonna want to do this. You’re not going to want to forgive. And that happens for all of us. We get out there and things go crazy and we forget about all the spiritual knowledge that we’ve gained and we fall right back into reacting along with the ego.
And the best way to overcome that eventually, and it takes practice, is to arm yourself with this knowledge so that it becomes so much a part of you, so much a part of your mind, that the day will come when, even when the stuff hits the fan, you don’t react and you actually remember the truth.
And my teachers said that that’s the hardest part…is remembering the truth. Once you know all of this, when the going gets tough, if you can actually remember it, then you’re winning. Then you’re more than half way home because that’s the hardest part. And I think it helps us to remember when we understand how beneficial it is to us, to practice this kind of forgiveness.
And the kind of knowledge that I’m gonna share with you right now should help you to remember to practice this kind this kind of forgiveness because you can realize exactly what’s happening in the unconscious mind very time you do this kind of forgiveness. And it’s really a miracle.
It’s really a wonderful and amazing thing that’s going on because the Holy Spirit is taking care of the part of the job that we can’t see. The Course teaches that our part is really very small. Now, I’m sure that that’s an idea that’s very annoying to the ego. That our part is really very small. But it is because as we said, that all that we see is this tiny speck of time and space with the conscious mind, but the Holy Spirit can see everything.
The Holy Spirit can see the past, the present, the future, everything that ever happened. And every time that we practice the kind of forgiveness that Jesus did, because when Jesus forgave everybody in the world what He did, every time He practiced this kind of forgiveness, it was like He was actually rejoining with himself. He was going from a state of separation back to a condition of oneness and wholeness and sanity. Every time He practiced forgiveness He was undoing separation and the ego and actually returning to holiness and wholeness and back to His home. And He knew that it had to work. That’s the way that the mind works. These are like, the laws of the mind. If you do this it has to work.
The way A Course in Miracles puts it is,
“That right-mindedness which is forgiveness, leads to one-mindedness which is the one-mindedness of spirit.
It leads to that automatically. The Course says,
“From there, the mind has no where else to go.”
Its direction is always determined by the thought system to which it adheres. So, what we’re talking about today are really two complete and mutually exclusive thought systems. One is the thought system of the Holy Spirit which leads us home and undoes separation and leads us back to that condition of wholeness and oneness in our experience and in our awareness. The other is the thought system of the ego, which keeps us stuck here and will keep us stuck here forever.
And there’s a reason that we have to undo that thought system of the ego if we want to break the cycle of birth and death. If we want to end reincarnation and really get back home again, then we have to do a certain kind of forgiveness. Because if we don’t then there is something there, in the unconscious mind, that we’re not aware of, that will prevent us from ever breaking the cycle of birth and death. And these metaphysics that I’m about to give you will help to explain why.
End of Session One
Session Two
My teachers said, “Before the beginning…,”
(the Bible says, “In the beginning…”)
My teachers said, “Before the beginning you have God. And that’s all there is.”
And, as we said, “Heaven is perfect awareness of perfect oneness and the idea that there is nothing else.”
So it’s just perfect oneness. And then God creates. But what God creates is exactly the same as Him. And, by the way, when we use the word “Him” to describe God or the Holy Spirit itself, that’s just a metaphor. In Spirit there is no such thing as male or female. So when I say “He” to describe the Holy Spirit I could just as easily use the word “She” but that wouldn’t be accurate either.
So, the reason why I use the word “He” is because A Course in Miracles uses biblical language. In fact it quotes over 800 times from the King James version of the Bible and it keeps the language uniform throughout the Course. And it also uses a lot of Shakespearean blank verse and I think that you can look at the Course as an artistic work, so the language in it is kept consistent.
And so, that’s what I do when I use the word “He” but it’s with the understanding that once you get to spirit there is no division. There are no opposites, which we’ll see why in just a second.
And so, you cannot have counterparts, you cannot have male and female in spirit. A Course in Miracles says, “The opposite of love is fear.” But what is all encompassing can have no opposite. So once you get back to reality there are no opposites and there is no counterpart.
So, how do we get back there? And even more interestingly, how did we come to think that we were here in the first place? Because this is real in our experience. And I’m not here to deny our experience. Our experience is that we are here or else we wouldn’t be experiencing that we are here.
So the Holy Spirit has to meet us where we think we are and lead us out of this, from the condition that we presently find ourselves in. So, to point out where we came from A Course in Miracles says that God and Heaven are perfect oneness and when God creates in Heaven, what it is, is a simultaneous extension of the whole. God does not create anything that is not exactly like Him.
So you have this kind of creation going on in Heaven that we can’t really understand at this level, because we have a finite human mind which is divided and severed and even though we can’t understand it, we can (believe it or not) experience this kind of love and creation and what it’s like to be with God in Heaven. We can even experience that right now, in this lifetime and see what it’s like. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that.
But we have God creating perfect oneness in Heaven and there is nothing else. And then A Course in Miracles teaches, that, as we said, “Into eternity where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea...” And that’s all it ever was. It was just a tiny mad idea. It was not significant at all. It was like a blip on the screen. It was like nothing. It was like what Joel Goldsmith called, “A parenthesis in eternity.” It was like totally insignificant.
Today we think it was really important because we want what we made to be important. And so we magnify it and we make it big and we make it important when it’s really nothing.
But what it was, was just an idea. Just a tiny mad idea that happened. It was over with instantaneously. It’s like Einstein said, “ Past, present and future all occur instantaneously and they all occur simultaneously.”
So you have all these things going on at the same time but then we made something called time to make it look like they were happening at different times. So we took this one tiny instant of time and chopped it up into billions and billions of pieces. So now you have all these intervals of time and you have a past and you have a present and you have a future that appear to be happening separately from each other, but that’s just symbolic of the thought of separation.
That’s also true of space. In space it may look like one person is sitting over there and one person is sitting over here, but that’s an illusion too. It’s a separation idea. It makes one space different from another and separate from another. It’s really all one. It’s really all connected and a Quantum physicist will tell you that. That even so much so that even if I look at an object I cause it to change instantaneously at the sub-atomic level.
Why is that? Why is it that if I look at a star that is twenty-billion light years away for example, I cause that to change instantaneously at the sub-atomic level? Well, the reason is because the star isn’t really twenty-billion light years away. It’s really in my mind, or more accurately, it’s a projection of my mind. And it’s symbolic of the thought of separation and the reason it changes instantaneously is because the whole idea of it being twenty-billion light years away is just made up. You know, the ideas like time, space, it’s all made up and it’s something that isn’t real. It’s something that just appears to be real.
And that’s why the Buddhists were right when they called it an illusion. And that’s why the Hindus have been right for thousands of years when they called it an illusion and A Course in Miracles likens it to a dream.
And so, in this story that we’re telling you about the miscreation of the universe, what’s happening is, soon as you have that tiny made idea it’s very much like a dream. Because the events in it may appear to happen but they don’t really happen.
And so, you have a tiny mad idea and that kind of tiny mad idea may be something like, oh…you know, “I wonder what it would be like if I went off and tried this on my own?”
That’s a separation idea because it implies an individual identity.
“What would it be like if I went off and played on my own?”
And what that does is it creates a different kind of an experience. Up until now our experience has been one of perfect oneness. And it’s an amazing experience. In that experience we are totally provided for, totally taken care of. There are no problems. There is no time. Everything is perfect.
But now all of a sudden, you have a different experience. Because of this thought of individuality and separation you now have a new experience which we will call consciousness.
Now we think that consciousness is something that’s very important. You know, we’re gonna raise our consciousness and we’re gonna save the planet with our Christ consciousness, which is an oxymoron. Because in order to have consciousness (it’s really just an idea of separation) so you have to have more than one thing. You have to have a subject and an object. You have to have something else to be conscious of.
And that’s why I think A Course in Miracles is the only spiritual teaching in the world that correctly identifies consciousness as the domain of the ego. It says that “Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver instead of a creator.”
So now you have something different going on than the kind of creation that goes on in Heaven and perfect oneness. Now you have a subject and an object. Before, you just had God. But now you have you and God.
And you’re divided and you feel separate and you feel all these things that never existed before. The very act of separation brings into possibility all kinds of ideas that never existed before but that could not exist if you did not have a separation followed by a subject and an object. So now you have you and God and you feel smaller and you feel divided and that’s where the idea of scarcity comes from.
You can’t have scarcity in perfect oneness. You can’t have lack in fullness. You can’t be missing anything if everything is whole and one and complete. But once you have a division or a separation, then you have what we’ll call
Twoness instead of oneness and now you have all these other ideas that follow. And probably the first idea would be:
“My goodness. What is this? I’ve done something wrong.”
Because it’s not full and whole and complete and it feels strange and it feels weird and it’s a new experience. And because of the fact that we have separated ourselves that creates twoness, which in turn creates opposites. It’s only in a condition of separation that you can have opposites! But now, in this condition of twoness instead of oneness, you have the possibility of all kinds of opposites.
Not the least of which is that you would have two separate ways of looking at this idea of separation.
Remembering now, that this is all new to us and it’s a totally different experience. And it’s starting to be kind of like a terrible experience. Kind of like a four-year-old who burns down the house. He didn’t know what was gonna happen when he was playing with those matches.
And then when he sees what happens he’s frightened and he’s very concerned and he’s very upset about the whole thing because he didn’t know what the effects was gonna be.
And so, we had this idea of separation. Two possible ways of looking at it. We’ll call one of the ways of looking at this idea of separation the Holy Spirit. Keeping in mind that we feel kind of strange and weird because we feel smaller now and scarce and it’s really not a good experience, and the Holy Spirit would probably come up to us and say:
“Hey. What’s your problem? You know God. You know what He’s like. What’s He ever done for you except give you everything? You know all He ever wants is to love you. You know all you have to do is go home, no problem, say ‘Hey, I’m back.’ Everything’s cool. It’s all taken care of. Don’t worry about it, just go home, everything’s cool.”
